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So, it's a sad state of affairs when you have a network outage because of the way your kids put things away. But that's what happened in our basement family room, where the kids shoved so much crap onto shelves that it pulled down my homemade wire run. That, in turn, put just enough strain on the terminals in one RJ-45 jack in my wiring closet - slash - network hub rack - slash - WAN equipment area (the place where my hub, router, and cable modem live) to cause a pair of wires to touch, creating an interesting cross-talk problem that took me a while to track down.

Apparently, that was all it took to push a 10-year old pocket hub that had been holding together my second-floor segment of the household LAN to decide its time had come, and it crapped out completely. It seems it was for the best anyway–my network speed has improved radically, so I suspect the hub was causing some latency or collision problems that I had never noticed. Hasta la vista, hublet.

Meanwhile, for a week, my sons had no Internet access while I tried to find the time to isolate the wiring problem and fix it. Tonight, I found the offending wiring block and re-did the punchdowns; within minutes, they were watching the new Harry Potter trailer.

Yet another reason to go totally wireless in our house, I suppose. But if we did that, all my 10Base-T skills would go to waste…

Comcast experienced a network-wide crash in the Baltimore area at noon
today. Not only that, but Comcast's phone response systems are
totally hosed as well–dialing in through their 800 number takes you
to pay-by-phone no matter what you do. A human being reached via a
local number said that the company was hoping to restore broadband
service by 3:00 today.

E-vandalism? E-warfare by Disney? Who knows?

After finishing the last case study I worked on for Baseline, I was ready to quit. The story was a lot harder to write than it should have been; we had split up the story into components, and in the end we had lots of repetitive content and no clean transitions between each of the parts. So, we killed ourselves doing the integration.

The task was made more difficult by the fact that my co-author is in San Jose, I’m in Baltimore, and our editors are in Manhattan. The workflow was entirely e-mail based; we were constantly sending pieces of drafts to each other, and no one ever had the full picture
of what was going on.

So, as we began to plan our next story, I decided I was going to take back control of my life and fix the collaboration problem. Our problems would seem to be the perfect fit for something like Groove, or eRoom, I suppose. But really, all we needed was a simple collaborative space where everything for the next story would live–contact lists, interview notes, and a single working draft of the story and its major subcomponents.

We needed, I concluded, a Wiki.

So, I did what any good technology journalist would do–I stole one, er leveraged existing work. I took the sample Wiki application from the MacPython distribution (thanks, Jack), made some relatively minor modifications to the code (like changing the storage directory to something other than /tmp), and slapped it up on my web host in a password-protected directory.

So far, so good. I’ve evangelized the Wiki a bit with my editors and co-author, and they all seem to think it’s a good idea. Considering it will give the editors an instant view on the progress of our next story, including the working draft, and that they can post questions and comments directly into the draft for us to respond to, I don’t see what there is about this for them not to like.

Now all I have to do is get them all to use it. While 123 lines of Python code on some insignificant BSD box may not revolutionize journalism, they may at least make my life more tolerable. And who knows? We might actually get a better story next time as a result. I’ll post updates here on our progress.